Editorial: Corcoran pushes poisonous imagery, corrupt conservatism

Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran is repeating American history — in one of the darkest ways possible.

Corcoran is reaching back to a poisonous and racially destructive archetype from America’s bloody past in his recent advertising campaign to increase his name recognition by manufacturing fear about immigration in Florida. His message is built on two false and ill-founded symbols:

1. White women who are pure, innocent and powerless.

2. Brown men who are dangerous outsiders preying on white women.

That is the central imagery driving Corcoran’s new ad that’s airing in multiple television markets throughout Florida. A happy and bright-faced white girl walks down a neighborhood sidewalk texting in broad daylight. And suddenly a hooded, angry and shadowy “illegal” pulls out a gun and shoots her.

The ad and imagery are almost too ignorant to be infuriating. In reality, the two characters in such a setting would be more likely to flirt, exchange phone numbers and go on a date — an idea that’s probably just as terrifying to anyone harboring the sort of race-rooted lament that Corcoran is trying to tap into.

Corcoran(Photo: Corcoran)

The commercial purports to show a reenactment of the attack on Kathryn Steinle, a young white woman who was shot and killed by a Mexican national in San Francisco in 2015. A horrible crime. But it has nothing to do with Florida.

Corcoran is attempting to make the bizarre leap from Steinle’s killing in San Francisco to a fallacious notion that the state of Florida is a place filled with dangerous, so-called “sanctuary cities.” He even floats the notion of Florida becoming a “sanctuary state.” It is not.

There are no laws, statutes or ordinances establishing any city in Florida as a “sanctuary city.” But reality has little to do with Corcoran’s crusade. The Republican Party of Florida has been running the state’s law-making show for decades. If somehow we were on the verge of becoming a so-called “sanctuary state,” whose fault that would be?

Again, the premise is almost too stupid to be infuriating. But when you strip away the phony narrative and look at the rotten core of racially-driven imagery, you see the harmful roots of this sort of messaging throughout American history. Sadly, despicably, this is nothing new.

The myth of the sinister, dark-skinned savage who attacks and defiles pure and virginal civilized women is as old as time. In the U.S., the archetype has been used to denigrate Native Americans and Italian immigrants, alike. It’s persisted for generations as a source for spreading immoral hate and fear against African Americans.

D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation"(Photo: D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation")

Corcoran is hardly the first filmmaker to manipulate such a motif. It was infamously employed in D.W. Griffith's absurd 1915 film celebrating the KKK, where an actor in black face pursues a virtuous white woman. Watch the clip. The fearful white face. The angry-eyed dark one. The assault. And the final fall of the innocent victim. Despite 100 years between them, there is a disturbing DNA common to Griffith's visual messaging and Corcoran's.

The savage brown man. The threatened white woman. At its worst, this insidious juxtaposition was the psychological ignition point for the brutal abduction, beating and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till — for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

This is the subtext to the imagery that Corcoran has chosen on which to build his political fortunes. Images and symbols are powerful things. Especially symbols that are weighted with such a long history of cruelty and wickedness in our country. The House speaker ought to be held accountable for the cowardly way that he’s choosing to weaponize them now.

This is not about being tough on crime. The fact is that Floridians bear witness to horrible criminal acts every single day. The reality is that these crimes are almost always committed by our own citizens.

Here in Escambia County, citizens have watched the seemingly endless arrests of child abusers, molesters and the worst criminals among us. How many of them turned out to be Corcoran’s vicious, shrouded stranger? And how often have the criminals been one of our own fellow Floridians, someone who worked in our communities, schools and churches.

The truth is that the violent law-breaking that plagues our communities comes almost entirely from the hands and hearts of our friends, neighbors and family members. Not illegal immigrants. Not some foreign and terrifying brown men.

That Corcoran would try to build a political career on convincing people otherwise is shameful. That he would brazenly market in these time-tested hate-grown archetypes is immoral. Leaders of the Republican Party of Florida are obligated to condemn this sort of toxicity.

Florida Republicans deserve leadership guided by philosophy, principles and intellectual honesty. Driven by personal ambition, Corcoran is now pushing a corrupt conservatism that will eventually taint the party and poison Florida with primal fear, hatred and paranoia. Someone should put a stop to it.